GOT HIM!

by Sheila Connolly


I was going to post a piece today about stuff and why we hang on it to, but it'll still be there later (just like all my stuff).  Today I awoke to headlines that the notorious, infamous, heinous (fill in adjective of your choice) Whitey Bulger has finally been captured, after being on the run from the FBI since 1995.

To most of the world this is no big thing, I suppose (despite his long presence on the FBI's Most Wanted List, right after Osama bin Laden, and the two million dollar reward on his head), but if you live in the Boston area, his continued absence has been in the news on and off since he disappeared.  Where's Whitey?  Is he dead?  Nope, he's alive and well, and he's been living in California with his long-time girlfriend, Catherine Grieg.

Since Monday of this week it's been all over the network news that the FBI had launched a new strategy, running ads with pictures of both of them during television programs favored by women, in case anyone had seen Catherine (the "moll") at a beauty salon or dentist's office.  Think they'll credit this campaign with the result?  (Probably not, given the timing, but maybe the ad campaign was designed to lull Whitey into a false sense of security.)

Before I say anything more, let me add for the record that I am not connected in any way to John Connolly, the Boston FBI agent who was feeding Whitey information for years, which enabled him to leave town shortly before he was to be arrested in 1995.  Connolly was convicted and did jail time for his role.

I know more than the average person about Whitey and his gang because when I was writing the Glassblowing Mysteries (as Sarah Atwell), my publisher suggested that the villains should be from the Mafia.  Having grown up in New Jersey, I thought the Mafia had been overdone, so I countered with, why not the Irish Mob?  I loved the thought of Boston bad guys trekking around the Arizona desert, completely out of their element.  In preparation for this, I read a couple of books written by some of Whitey's lieutenants (I won't name names, because I think they're all out of prison now--and doing book tours!).  Interesting if scary reading, because the authors were so completely amoral, except when it came to loyalty to their boss.  Even now I can't drive though Southie (Boston's South End, Bulger's power base) without thinking of those stories--and where the bodies were buried.

Whitey's tale also held a delicious irony:  while Whitey was one of the country's most notorious criminals, his brother William was the leader of the Massachusetts Senate, and subsequently president of the University of Massachusetts system (he admitted speaking to his brother just after Whitey blew town, but swore that he hadn't heard from him since).  Nobody has proven that Bill Bulger knew anything about Whitey's whereabouts (or his criminal activities?).

Does fiction get any better than this?  A man who has been credited with at least 20 murders, who ruled the Boston underworld with an iron hand, and then eluded FBI pursuit for years?  With a beautiful blonde companion?

Want to bet that there will be a Whitey Bulger: My Story book in the works in minutes?

Should Actions Speak Louder than Words?

by Sheila Connolly

As I excavate my way through my multi-year TBR pile, I’ve been sampling a few genres that I don’t read consistently—in this case, suspense and thrillers. Two in particular I happened to read back to back: John Connolly’s The Reapers, and the first two of Barry Eisler’s John Rain series, Rain Fall and Hard Rain (yes, the series that he is famously taking straight to ebook now).



John Connolly’s book is a couple of years old, but it’s a signed copy that I obtained from the author when we signed together at Bouchercon (guess who had the longer line?). No relation that I know of, but I haven’t given up hope.


The Eisler books are “homework,” since he will be one of the Guests of Honor at New England Crime Bake this year, for which I am co-chair (shameless promotion: it’s a great conference!) and I thought I should know something about his work when I interview him.


I think that for both writers, their characters are intriguing, their plots are fast-paced, their settings are drawn with a wealth of pertinent details. There are even moral messages tucked in here and there. But they also share a similarity that startled me: their use of language.


In both cases, I would be happily reading along, caught up in the alternately feverish or ominous story, and I’d come across a metaphor or a description that was so compelling that I had to stop and think about it. Like, “wow, that’s brilliant, and I know exactly what you mean!”

For example, in The Reapers, Connolly writes, “A wind farm occupied the hills to the west, the blades unmoving, like playthings abandoned by the offspring of giants.” If you’ve ever seen a wind farm, you’ll see the aptness of this. (I’m also much enamored of a throwaway line in the same book, “phlegm-colored golf shirts,” because I swear my father had at least one of those.)



Or Eisler’s descriptions of a Japanese city neighborhood, in Hard Rain: “Everywhere were metastasizing telephone lines, riots of electrical wires, laundry hanging from prefabricated apartment windows like tears from idiot eyes,” or, “A solitary vending machine sat slumped on a street corner, its fluorescent light guttering like a dying SOS.”


But is this a good or a bad thing?


Any book is a complex, multi-dimensional matrix of elements: character, plot, pacing, setting. In the case of mysteries, you have to add a puzzle, one that must be resolved by the end of the book in a satisfying way. Picture juggling five balls in the air at the same time, and catching them all at the end. No writer pretends it’s easy, although some make it look easy (curse them!). Often in the case of suspense and thrillers, the language and imagery take a back seat. In most cases that’s appropriate, because the writer wants the reader to be invested in the story, to be pulled along breathlessly--to keep turning the pages!


But still, the right image can capture so much in a few words, and can add depth and color to a character based in his or her perceptions of the world. Such nuggets of gold must be used judiciously and sparingly, lest the writer stray into florid Bulwer-Lytton territory (you know, the “it was a dark and stormy night” guy). You don’t want to read a paragraph-long tribute to the wine-dark polish on the revolver that’s about to kill our narrator, the symmetrical star-flash occasioned by the firing of the cartridge, the arrow-straight flight of the bullet headed for his chest. Because then the tension is gone.


Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote: “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.” I read this years ago , and I’ve always remembered it. But how much poetry can a mystery writer afford in his or her book?


I think we need a judicious dash of it now and then. We as writers hope that we’re putting our words in the best order, but we should recognize and salute it when a writer manages to slip in a measured dose of the best words, without sacrificing any other part of the story.


What do you think?